In Gassho,

Inryu Sensei

Exploring the place of Women in the Soto Zen Lineage

In our long service of bowing and chanting, we recite the “Names of Buddhas and Ancestors” – beginning with the Seven Buddhas Before Buddha, and ending with the founder of our Soto Zen School, Eihei Dogen, and his two immediate successors who established the lineage of teachers that we now honor. All of these are male. In fact, we used to call them “Buddhas and Patriarchs”. In recent years, much research and collaboration by a group of Zen teachers and scholars have created a parallel document, a women ancestors document. What does it mean to have a separate women’s lineage? Why are there no women in the lineage we do chant – or are there? And what does Dogen have to say about women, gender, and separation?

Rev. Choro with Sensei Inryu in 2015

Rev. Choro Carla Antonaccio is a Soto Zen Buddhist priest ordained in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi by her teacher, Roshi Josho Pat Phelan. She began formal practice in 1999 at Chapel Hill Zen Center where she has been a resident practitioner since 2005. Rev. Choro has trained at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, San Francisco Zen Center City Center, and Green Gulch Farm. She was Shuso for the Chapel Hill Zen Center community in 2016.

Photograph taken after our first Zen Retreat of 2019

Join members of the All Beings Zen Sangha for a Fire Ceremony.  This is a ceremony were we write down the habits and tendencies, difficult states of mind, tangled aspects of relationships, and so on, that we would like to release. We will have an outdoor small fire to burn our papers along with the name cards from Memorial Services held during the past year and incense stubs and zen sewing thread bits that have accumulated throughout year. Everyone is welcome.

Following the ceremony please feel welcome to join us inside for our regular Wednesday night zen sewing practice and precept study which ends at 7:30pm.

Poem by Benji Robert Quinn on the occasion of Shinren Mark Stone’s Shuso ceremony

All Beings Zen Sangha – Washington DC

December 15, 2018

306: a poem

I

Right here, if you stay very still and wait

You might just glimpse a dragon take her seat,

Unfurl her wings and gaze at a floor

Whose lines shoot an arrow straight at the dusty world,

Where birds sing and blowers wail and lions roar,

Whose footworn sheen is lit by lamps that pass their light

To four windows, each painting a neverending picture

Entitled: “The birth and death of leaves in the wind.”

II

Right here, be you.

Whatever your path,

Whatever the hundred thousand pages

You have written about yourself reveal,

The good, the bad the ugly all meet the same response:

A simple bow that says “I see you. You matter.

But don’t take my word for it. Have a seat and find out why.”

III

Right here you have helped me to carry my heavy book,

Taken the smoking incense from my fingers with care,

Fallen to the floor, just to look into the eyes of a child,

And drawn a wide and gentle circle that asks to be stepped into.

IV

Right here, you have held our practice with your open arms.

Now, hear the Shuso!

Dec 4th- Naomi Ayala SoKei TekiKu (Ancestor Jewel Reveal Sky) to offer a “Way Seeking Mind Talk”

following one period of zazen 7pm

 

Born in Puerto Rico, Naomi Ayala moved to the United States in her teens. Writing in both Spanish and English, she is author of the poetry collections Wild Animals on the Moon (1997), chosen by the New York City Public Library as a 1999 Book for the Teen Age, and This Side of Early (2008). Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Boriquén to Diasporican: Puerto Rican Poetry from Aboriginal Times to the New Millennium (2007), Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature (2006), and First Flight: 24 Latino Poets (2006).  

An educator and arts administrator interested in environmental causes, Naomi-san is a recipient of  the Connecticut Latinas in Leadership Award, the 2000 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy of Environmental Justice Award, and the 2001 Larry Neal Writers Award for Poetry from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
– bio edited from the Poetry Foundation

 

 Way Seeking Mind Talk 

 7pm November 29th, 2018  – following one period of zazen

offered by Dae Jin Kevin Hall

Way Seeking Mind Talk

 6:30am , November 21st, 2018 – following a brief period of  zazen